A vibrant debate about the future direction of biodiversity conservation centers on the merits of the so-called new conservation. Proponents of the new conservation advocate a series of positions on ...key conservation ideas, such as the importance of human-dominated landscapes and conservation's engagement with capitalism. These have been fiercely contested in a debate dominated by a few high-profile individuals, and so far there has been no empirical exploration of existing perspectives on these issues among a wider community of conservationists. We used Q methodology to examine empirically perspectives on the new conservation held by attendees at the 2015 International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB). Although we identified a consensus on several key issues, 3 distinct positions emerged: in favor of conservation to benefit people but opposed to links with capitalism and corporations, in favor of biocentric approaches but with less emphasis on wilderness protection than prominent opponents of new conservation, and in favor of the published new conservation perspective but with less emphasis on increasing human well-being as a goal of conservation. Our results revealed differences between the debate on the new conservation in the literature and views held within a wider, but still limited, conservation community and demonstrated the existence of at least one viewpoint (in favor of conservation to benefit people but opposed to links with capitalism and corporations) that is almost absent from the published debate. We hope the fuller understanding we present of the variety of views that exist but have not yet been heard, will improve the quality and tone of debates on the subject. Un debate vibrante sobre la futura dirección de la conservación de la biodiversidad se centra en los méritos de la supuesta nueva conservación. Quienes proponen la nueva conservación abogan por una serie de posiciones sobre ideas clave de conservación, como la importancia de los paisajes dominados por humanos y la participación de la conservación dentro del capitalismo. Estas ideas han sido disputadas ferozmente en un debate dominado por unos cuantos individuos de alto perfil y hasta ahora no ha habido una exploración empírica de las perspectivas existentes sobre estos temas entre una comunidad más amplia de conservacionistas. Utilizamos la metodología Q para examinar empíricamente las perspectivas sobre la nueva conservación que realizaron quienes asistieron al Congreso Internacional para la Biología de la Conservación 2015 (CIBC). Aunque identificamos un consenso sobre varios temas importantes, emergieron tres posiciones distintas: a favor de la conservación para beneficiar a las personas pero en contra de los vínculos con el capitalismo y las corporaciones, a favor de las estrategias biocéntricas pero con menos énfasis en la protección de la vida silvestre que los oponentes prominentes de la nueva conservación, y a favor de la perspectiva publicada de la nueva conservación pero con menos énfasis en el creciente bienestar humano como meta de la conservación. Nuestros resultados revelaron diferencias entre el debate sobre la nueva conservación en la literatura y los puntos de vista dentro de una comunidad de la conservación más amplia pero todavía limitada y demostró la existencia de por lo menos un punto de vista (a favor de la conservación para beneficiar a las personas pero en contra de los vínculos con el capitalismo y las corporaciones) que está casi ausente del debate publicado. Esperamos que el entendimiento más completo que presentamos de la variedad de puntos de vista que existen pero aún no han sido escuchados mejorará la calidad y el todo de los debates sobre el tema.
In light of trade-offs related to the allocation of ecosystem services we investigate the prevalent norms that are drawn upon to justify why ecosystem governance should prioritise poverty ...alleviation. We are specifically concerned with poverty alleviation because we consider this an urgent problem of justice. We review empirical literature on social trade-offs in ecosystem services governance in order to identify the prevalent conceptions of justice that inform scholarly assessments of current practice. We find that empirical studies do present specific notions of justice as desirable benchmarks for ecosystem services governance but that they rarely attempt to spell out the precise meaning of these notions or what makes them desirable. For those notions of justice that we identify in this literature - sufficientarianism, egalitarianism and participatory approaches - we draw on philosophical justice literature in order to better articulate the normative arguments that could support them and to be more precise about the kind of actions and expectations that they invoke. Moreover, we point to some striking normative silences in the ecosystem services literature. We conclude that the ecosystem services justice discourse would benefit from more conceptual clarity and a broader examination of different aspects of justice.
•Justice norms in empirical studies on ecosystem services governance are investigated.•Justice receives little attention in scholarly work on ecosystem services.•Sufficientarianism, egalitarianism and participation are key benchmarks.
Ten facts about land systems for sustainability Meyfroidt, Patrick; de Bremond, Ariane; Ryan, Casey M ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
02/2022, Letnik:
119, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize ...knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits-"win-wins" are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.
Many commentators have raised questions about the recent focus on ecosystem services (ES) concepts in conservation, but little empirical analysis exists. We present a novel empirical analysis using ...interviews and Q Methodology to examine how conservation practitioners and organisations are interpreting and using ES concepts and associated approaches. We find that these concepts are being adopted for instrumental imperatives to broaden constituencies and with an expectation of extending funding sources. We uncover concerns within conservation that the utilitarian emphases of ES concepts may compromise the ability to make non-utilitarian arguments for nature in the future. In relation to changing practice, we examine shifts in partnerships and funding, where ES ideas provide a shared language about flows of value, apparently accelerating the integration of conservation and the private sector. Whilst many respondents noted the significance of shifts related to ES ideas, some attempted to play these down, presenting their organisation’s adoption of these ideas as ‘just a rhetorical tool’. However, we argue that the adoption of ES concepts cannot be presented as solely rhetorical, given that these increasingly underpin and inform planning tools and policy instruments.
•Lack of empirical analysis of how ecosystem servicesconcepts are used in conservation•We examine this using qualitative and Q methodological research.•Concepts are adopted to broaden constituencies and in expectation of increasing funding.•Widespread concern that servicesconcepts undermine non-utilitarian conservation rationale.•Changes manifest in conservation planning tools and policies, well beyond a rhetorical realm.
Social valuation of ecosystem services and public policy alternatives is one of the greatest challenges facing ecological economists today. Frameworks for valuing nature increasingly include ...shared/social values as a distinct category of values. However, the nature of shared/social values, as well as their relationship to other values, has not yet been clearly established and empirical evidence about the importance of shared/social values for valuation of ecosystem services is lacking. To help address these theoretical and empirical limitations, this paper outlines a framework of shared/social values across five dimensions: value concept, provider, intention, scale, and elicitation process. Along these dimensions we identify seven main, non-mutually exclusive types of shared values: transcendental, cultural/societal, communal, group, deliberated and other-regarding values, and value to society. Using a case study of a recent controversial policy on forest ownership in England, we conceptualise the dynamic interplay between shared/social and individual values. The way in which social value is assessed in neoclassical economics is discussed and critiqued, followed by consideration of the relation between shared/social values and Total Economic Value, and a review of deliberative and non-monetary methods for assessing shared/social values. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of shared/social values for decision-making.
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•Individualist valuation approaches obscure and underplay collective meanings and significance ascribed to natural environments•There is a lack of theoretical and empirical clarity on what constitutes shared and social values and how they can be assessed•We provide a theoretical framework to discriminate dimensions of shared/social values and an overview of valuation methods•A shared values approach to valuation can enhance legitimacy, effectiveness and transparency of evidence and help manage risks
Miombo and mopane woodlands are the dominant land cover in southern Africa. Ecosystem services from these woodlands support the livelihoods of 100 M rural people and 50 M urban dwellers, and others ...beyond the region. Provisioning services contribute $9 ± 2 billion yr−1 to rural livelihoods; 76% of energy used in the region is derived from woodlands; and traded woodfuels have an annual value of $780 M. Woodlands support much of the region's agriculture through transfers of nutrients to fields and shifting cultivation. Woodlands store 18–24 PgC carbon, and harbour a unique and diverse flora and fauna that provides spiritual succour and attracts tourists. Longstanding processes that will impact service provision are the expansion of croplands (0.1 M km2; 2000–2014), harvesting of woodfuels (93 M tonnes yr−1) and changing access arrangements. Novel, exogenous changes include large-scale land acquisitions (0.07 M km2; 2000–2015), climate change and rising CO2. The net ecological response to these changes is poorly constrained, as they act in different directions, and differentially on trees and grasses, leading to uncertainty in future service provision. Land-use change and socio-political dynamics are likely to be dominant forces of change in the short term, but important land-use dynamics remain unquantified.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Tropical grassy biomes: linking ecology, human use and conservation’.
This article responds to a gap in existing research on access to environmental spaces in rural and coastal areas, especially of less advantaged members of society who could potentially benefit the ...most from exposure to such environments but face a whole host of constraints. We build on existing theorisations of access to natural resources and ecosystem services in the development literature and integrate insights from the sociology of access to environmental spaces, health geography and environmental psychology in industrialized contexts. We employ semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation with socio-economically disadvantaged respondents in Cornwall, UK. Participants' accounts reveal four mechanisms that mediate access to ecosystem benefits: rights-based, physical, structural and relational, and psychosocial, and we thus extend Ribot and Peluso's access framework. We conclude that socio-economic disadvantage mediates access to environmental spaces, in particular through psychosocial mechanisms, and highlight the interlinked and complementary nature of the four types of access mechanisms.
•Social scientists commonly argue that biodiversity conservationists support markets.•We use Q methodological analysis to test this assumption.•We find two distinct perspectives, which show ...convergence around cautious pragmatism.•Views on markets are more sceptical than the social science literature suggests.•We identify reasons that individuals’ perspectives might diverge from organisational.
The recent history of biodiversity conservation practice has been characterised by the increasing use of market-based instruments. In seeking to understand this development, an emerging body of critical social science research tends to characterise conservationists as being ideologically in favour of markets in conservation. An alternative possibility is that conservationists pursue market solutions as a pragmatic response to prevailing political and economic circumstances. In this paper we seek to establish empirically what a sample of conservation professionals actually think about markets in conservation. We used Q-methodology, a tool for analysing structure and form within respondents’ subjective positions. The results show that our respondents are circumspect about the growing use of markets in conservation. We identify two dominant discourses that we label ‘outcome focused enthusiasm and ‘ideological scepticism’. Neither of these perspectives indicates strong, or uncritical, support for market approaches, and the views of our respondents appear to recognise the limitations of markets both in theory and practice. While there is some difference in views between the two dominant discourses that we document in this paper, there is considerable convergence towards a position that we label ‘cautious pragmatism’. We conclude that those studying conservation need to be cautious about over-generalising the perspectives and values held by conservation professionals, as there appears to be far less consensus about the adoption of market-led approaches in this sector than has been suggested. Further research could investigate the drivers of pro-market behaviour at the organisational level given the evident personal scepticism of our respondents.
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